Recently uploaded to Youtube. No violin player or music lover will be unmoved.

We have belatedly been notified of the death in June – unreported in other media – of Philip Nelson, Dean of the Yale School of Music from 1970 to 1980. He was 88.

Chair of the music department at SUNY Binghamton until he became Dean at Yale, Philip turned a dusty faculty into an enterprising one. He appointed Krzysztof Penderecki, Otto-Werner Mueller and Claude Frank as teachers, adding the Tokyo String Quartet as artists-in-residence.

He founded Music at Yale and was forever open to ideas that enabled music and scholarship to reach a wide public.

 

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In a highly unusual initiative that crosses hardline ethnic prejudices, players in the Czech Philharmonic are running a music and dance camp for around 60 Roma kids.

roma kids czech phil

Petr Kadlec of the orchestra’s education department says:

‘We want to support children and youth in socially excluded localities and we are trying to do it with the help of music.

‘As you know, in the socially excluded localities in the Czech Republic and Slovakia there is no-one or almost no-one who takes care of talented Roma children and youth, and that is something we are trying to change with this project.

‘So we are trying to support talented singers and dancers and to work with them. We believe it might a kind of life-changing experience for them because they experience themselves in a positive situation. We hope that they can gain more self-confidence and more self-assuredness, so that is in short the reason why we, as the Czech Philharmonic, are taking part.’

More here.

roma czech phil

Last summer, the Academy of La Scala terminated the studies of young mezzo Lilly Jørstad after two years, even though the opera house was engaging her in serious roles.

lilly jorstad

 

Lilly has continued to win roles since then. Now she has been awarded Norway’s Arctic Talent 2016 scholarship, worth €43,000 ($48,000), to help further her career.

Graham Spicer has the full story here.

 

 

The Philharmonia announced this morning that it had failed to identify a successor to managing director David Whelton, who is retiring next month after nearly 30 years.

As an interim measure, joint principal trumpet Alistair Mackie will manage the company until a suitable candidate is identified.

Horn player Kira Doherty will chair the board in his absence.

This is not a brilliant outcome.

Five months ago the Philharmonia released its inventive director of Creative Projects James Williams to become manager of the rival Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

james williams

 

Patrice Munsel was the Met’s youngest-ever debutant when, in 1943 at the age of 17, she sang Philine in Ambroise Thomas’s Mignon.

She went on to become a house fixture as Adele in Die Fledermaus. But she yearned to sing Violetta in La Traviata and walked out on the Met in 1958 after Rudolf Bing refused to give her the role.

By this time, she had made 225 stage appearances and earned her own TV show. Pat Munsel was a household name.

She died on August 4, aged 91.

Fine hometown obituary here.

Patrice-Munsel-LIFE-1944

London Guildhall School has appointed Rebecca Gilliver, principal cellist of the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), to be its professor of cello.

The school and the orchestra inhabit the same Barbican Centre.

Congratulations all round.

 

rebecca gilliver

Zachary Woolfe, classical music editor of the New York Times, wrote a heated review last month of a Mozart opera at a festival in France. The article provoked a noted Mozart authority, Professor Ralph P. Locke, to send a dissenting letter to the Times, questioning the extent of Woolfe’s knowledge of Mozart. The Times did not publish it.

So Professor Locke has circulated the letter, none too privately. He makes several good points. Not fit to print in the Times, apparently.

cosi aix

 

To the Editor of the Arts Section (New York Times): 

Zachary Woolfe (Sunday, July 17, Can a Tool of Power Bring Change?) proposes that operas from earlier eras were a “tool of [elite] power.” An opera house today, he feels, is morally bound to alter works substantially—or to replace them with new works—in order to “make reparations” for the damage that those works have done over the centuries. His examples include operas by Mozart.

The Abduction from the Seraglio—Woolfe claims—“makes comedy out of sex slavery [in Turkey].” But comedy can take many forms. In Blonde’s duet with her captor Osmin, the Englishwoman undermines—through sharp-witted verbal and musical ridicule of her self-appointed “master”—his smug demand that a mere “slave-woman” obey his every wish. Here comedy is put to the service of social critique. More generally, Mozart’s operas are attuned to the evils of male privilege and domination, whether in Europe (as in Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro) or elsewhere (as inAbduction and The Magic Flute).

As for slavery generally, a notable scene in Abduction is omitted from most productions. It involves a “mute black man” who is apparently a slave. His situation is not treated at all comically. The Magic Flute contains two remarkable spoken scenes (likewise rarely included) in which three male slaves—apparently Egyptian—complain bitterly about their cruel slave-driver, Monostatos. And yet, despite their sufferings, the slaves show empathy for the captive (and “white”) princess Pamina.

Great operas are often richer in nuance and complexity than commentators—and certain strongly interventionist stage directors—seem to realize.

Ralph P. Locke
Clarksburg, Maryland
(professor emeritus, Eastman School of Music)

The Bulgarian mezzo Vesselina Kasarova has pulled out of the Innsbruck Festival of Ancient Music, where she was due to sing Fidalma in Cimarosa’s rarely-seen Il Matrimonio Segreto.

A festival statement said Vesselina had returned home to Switzerland to recover from being attacked late at night by two unknown persons who tried to snatch her handbag. It is not clear where the attack took place and whether the attackers were apprehended. The festival said certain details were being withheld.

The Italian mezzo  Loriana Castellano, who has appeared in other Cimarosa works, has learned the role with a few days to spare, saving the production.

 

vesselina kasarova

Our social affairs editor has brought in a picture of the wedding on July 29 of the brilliant young Jamie Phillips to his beloved Rosie.

Jamie, 25, is associate conductor of the Halle Orchestra in Manchester and a Dudamel Fellow at the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

We wish the young couple every possible happiness.

jamie philips wedding